A decade ago, I lived full-time in Iraq as a U.S. State Department official. One winter day, I joined a U.S. Army battalion commander on patrol in Sadr City, home to a million impoverished Iraqis and site of fierce fighting between the U.S. military and Tehran-backed Shia militias.
Looking toward a nearby curb, I noticed a large chunk of concrete had recently been blasted away. The lieutenant colonel explained that just days before a new variety of advanced roadside bomb – technology honed in Iran – had decapitated a U.S. soldier at our location.
This kind of “explosively formed penetrator” (EFP, for short) turns metal molten in an instant, like buckshot from hell, and was responsible for the deaths of many U.